I know Hive account@starkerz 's been pushing recently on trimming down the expenditures and avoiding a potential death spiral. I highly value this, as I understand the positive intentions for Hive ecosystem overall.
I agree with a lot of points mentioned above, with feedback on a few (and a perspective based on our experience/involvment):

• Proposals with max 3 months period: this is unrealistic, especially for projects continuously building on Hive. Our experience with proposal votes is they often take a lot of time to reach threshold, so planning on every next iteration would be a big hassle. As per DHF current mechanisms, projects not abiding by your requirements can simply lose your vote on set timeline, regardless of their timeframe.
• Regular reporting: Definitely agree on this one. One great way for this is via swarm of swarms initiative by Hive account@hivetrending. We've been using it on a weekly basis to highlight our work, and it's on chain. Core dev monthly meetings are also very helpful for summary updates, and they're also on youtube. I suggest using such mediums for tracking progress as well. Lack of any reporting is a bad sign from any project.
• Value returned to DHF: not all projects or proposals return financial value to DHF. Building on Hive itself is an essential value. One of the main things we've been doing is introducing and involving more devs to Hive, whether via Actifit or Hive's HAF (which is why our latest proposal had higher daily value). The value to the chain cannot be always measured in short term figures, as a lot of work can be planned long term, and the outcome only show after a while.
• Budgeting: This is a two-edged sword. While some projects are overcharging for some of their work, cutting off budgeting and turning into maintenance mode risks killing development. I understand your target is fixing economics, but shutting down innovation is shooting ourselves in the foot. I agree with trimming down project daily payouts, again especially for projects overcharging with a low number of staff. From our perspective, our proposals were planned on resource (and hardware) cost. Given current tokenomics and state of affairs, we plan on reducing our resources and hence our daily DHF ask, to help with economics, while not killing innovation. We operated for a long while based off our own funds, working on both actifit and HAF, but we cannot maintain such a large pool of devs, with unfunded proposals.
• Open source: while not mentioned in your points, i would suggest any dev project that is seeking funding to be open source.
• HBD APR 6%: our witness currently signals 10%. We would even like this value to go down to 0. Only reason we went through with a higher value is due to initiative by major witnesses to push an incentive based 20% APR - now 15%. This has not yielded much success, so reviewing and adjusting makes sense. There are risks involved such as conversions, so this might need to be taken in slow steps. Instead of an APR on savings, an alternative incentive could be in having trading pairs with liquidity in HBD. Also the HBD economy /distriator is a great concept as it picks up further.
• Nice to hear about WIP. Looking forward to seeing it unfold.